how to make your research more visible

publication strategy and ethical aspects

Damien Belvèze
damien.belveze@univ-rennes.fr

Université de Rennes

2024-12-04

  • Roads (Green, Road, Diamond)

  • Scientific misconduct (nepotic / predatory journals, harking)

  • consistent CV and collection of all academic works

a toot posted in Mastodon by a researcher asking where she should publish her paper on analysis of Twitter data to explore the science reform community structure

where should I publish

  • nepotistic journals
  • bibliodiversity
  • open science standards

editorial bias and nepotistic reviews

“nepotistic or self promotion journals”

  • when the most prolific authors are also part of the editorial board
  • when you have kins or team mates in the editorial board

editor-in chief and 6 other board members work for him they authored together 44% of the published papers (2021) 📓 Scanff et al. (2021)

what’s the point of registering a study

  • increase transparency
  • get feedback from the design of the study
  • reduce data or hypothesis manipulation risks (harking)

Where to register a study

Prospero for biology and Health Sciences

Zenodo for every discipline

OSF for every discipline

journal finders

Bison built upon DOAJ and OpenCites

You have just finished the manuscript of your paper. To which journals will you submit it ?

  • you do not have money to pay Article Processes Charges

  • your paper should be accessible to all without embargo once published

should you deposit a preprint version of your work ?

should you deposit a preprint version of your work ?

  • is it possible to have a paper published in the Bone & Joint Journal after having deposited it on BioRXiv?

  • is it possible to have a paper published in the ACM Journal on Experimental Algorithmics after having deposited it on SSRN (owned by Elsevier)?

  • is it possible to have a paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids after having deposited in an institutionnal preprint server?

SherpaRomeo gives you the answer

should you deposit a preprint version of your work ?

is it possible to have a paper published in the Bone & Joint Journal after having deposited it on BioRXiv?

  • No, this journal does not publish papers whose submitted version can be found in any preprint server

is it possible to have a paper published in the ACM Journal on Experimental Algorithmics after having deposited it on SSRN (owned by Elsevier)?

  • only non-for-profit preprint servers are accepted by the journal’s policy. Elsevier is a for profit company.

is it possible to have a paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids after having deposited in an institutionnal preprint server?

  • any preprint server will be accepted

Plan S : make scientific output immediately available

  • green open access with retention right strategy
  • gold open access
  • diamond open access

Green Open Access

traditional way of publishing

  • inflation of subscription costs
  • 2012, Tim Gowers : “The cost of knowledge”
  • embargo periods

  • 2023 Total expenses : 1 496 848 €
  • about 1000 euros by researcher
  • average annual increase of subscription costs : 1-2 %
  • Deal cancellations : Springer (in 2018)
  • subscription fee for Science Direct only : 406 232 €

Green Open Access with embargoes

Loi pour une République Numérique (article 30) (journal articles published with 50% by public funds)

  • STEM: 6 months
  • SHS: 12 months

Gold Open Access

  • immediately open access
  • Gold should be more than “APC”
  • hybrid Open Access

Licences

Retention right strategy

  • attribution of a CC-by licence to the submitted paper.

  • usually followed by an explanatory letter to the publisher

  • Some of them negociate for an extra-fee (Article Development Charges)

Gold OA

When Gold means “a lot of money to pay as APC”

  • APC (nature) : up to 9500 $
  • average (France, 2020) : 2488 € 📓 Blanchard et al. (2022)
  • 2012 - 2022 APC costs (France) X3

Diamond OA

  • some SHS journals do not want to give up the subscription model but they do not think in full-costs terms

  • some OA pure players are very fragile. When they shut down, we loose hundreds of papers going offline

  • sources: 📓 Dalmeet (2024) ,Wild (2024)

which way of publishing is possible / recommended

  • Journal checker tool

  • research funded by ANR, supported by University of Rennes, publication opportunity : American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology

  • research funded by National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, made in University of Melbourne, publication opportunity : Human heredity (Karger)

  • research funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations, supported by University Alassane Ouattara, publication opportunity : Games and Culture

predatory open access publishers

  • Absent or problematic peer reviewing process
  • Mimicry (impersonation) towards legitimate journals
  • Intensive spamming (over-flattering emails)
  • false or dubious metrics
  • lack of details about APC, peer-review process, publication licence

how to avoid this trap

  • black lists are ineffective (and expensive)
  • white lists combined with criteria could be usefull
  • ask yourself the good questions

Are these journal reliable for a publication

A usefull tool : the Compass to Publish

The three pillars of Open Science

  • Publications
  • Data management
  • Source Code

Your CV HAL must contain all your work! (not only your publications)

persistent identifiers for researchers

Why should you have an ORCID?

  • international standard
  • get credited for all the works you have published
  • pivot identifier with commercial (WOSID, ScopusID) or institutional identifiers (idHAL, idref)
  • for administration, make easier to link grants, publications, source code, datasets to a single researcher
  • higher adoption rate in STEM than in SHS

other things you may consider to do in order to be more visible

  • managing you Google Scholar profile
  • creating accounts on social networks (Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky ?)
  • creating a static website to share your thoughts and showcase the diversity of your works

Twitter : should I go or should I stay?

STAY

  • all community on one platform
  • Ok, Twitter was better before, but my followers are here
  • friendly user interface (=I don’t want to change for another UI)

LEAVE

  • Twitter’s enshitification by Elon Musk (> nov 2022)
  • breeding ground for climate denialists herds and far-right wing fake news superspreaders
  • Mastodon is open source (no hidden algorithm)
  • Mastodon is decentralized
  • reduced negativity bias (information gain)

personal website

In essence, the researcher is dispersed: conferences, journal articles, book chapters, blog posts, courses, project management, scientific or editorial committees, etc. It’s a job that involves a wide variety of written and oral productions. It’s a profession that involves a wide variety of written and oral productions. If only to unify all this, to guarantee an exhaustive point of access, it would be useful to have a portal linking all the digital or analog places of knowledge where we work.

(Arthur Perret 📓 Perret (2018) )

Bibliography

Blanchard, A., Thierry, D., & Graaf, M. van der. (2022). Retrospective and prospective study of the evolution of APC costs and electronic subscriptions for French institutions [Report, Comité pour la science ouverte]. https://doi.org/10.52949/26
Dalmeet, S. C. (2024, April 9). A key chemistry journal disappeared from the web. Others are at risk. Chemistry World. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/a-key-chemistry-journal-disappeared-from-the-web-others-are-at-risk/4019265.article
Perret, A. (2018, December 17). Dr Jekyll & Mr TeX. arthurperret.fr/. https://www.arthurperret.fr/blog/2018-12-17-dr-jekyll-et-mr-tex.html
Scanff, A., Naudet, F., Cristea, I. A., Moher, D., Bishop, D. V. M., & Locher, C. (2021). A survey of biomedical journals to detect editorial bias and nepotistic behavior. PLOS Biology, 19(11), e3001133. https://doi.org/gnk8b8
Wild, S. (2024). Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00616-5